Iron Acquisition of Urinary Tract Infection Involves Pathogenicity in .

Uropathogenic (UPEC) is a major bacterial pathogen that causes urinary tract infections (UTIs). The mouse is an available UTI model for studying the pathogenicity; however, represents as an alternative surrogate host with the capacity for high-throughput analysis. Then, we established a simple assay for a UPEC infection model with for large-scale screening. A total of 133 clinically isolated strains, which included UTI-associated and fecal isolates, were applied to demonstrate the simple pathogenicity assay. From the screening, several virulence factors (VFs) involved with iron acquisition (, and ) were significantly associated with high pathogenicity. We then evaluated whether the VFs in UPEC were involved in the pathogenicity. Mutants of UTI89 with defective iron acquisition systems were applied to a solid killing assay with . As a result, the survival rate of fed with the mutants significantly increased compared to when fed with the parent strain. The results demonstrated, the simple assay with was useful as a UPEC infectious model. To our knowledge, this is the first report of the involvement of iron acquisition in the pathogenicity of UPEC in a . model.